We Have Met the Nazis, and They are Us

CIA atrocities revealed to a national shrug

Godwin's Law be damned--it's impossible to read the newly released
CIA report on the torture of Muslim prisoners without thinking of the
Third Reich.

Sadism exists in every culture. A century ago, for example, Western
adventurers who visited Tibet reported that the authorities in Lhasa,
that supposed capital of pacifism, publicly gouged out criminals' eyes
and yanked out their tongues. But Nazi atrocities were stylistically
distinct from, say, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians or the
Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s. German war crimes were
characterized by methodical precision, the application of "rational"
technology to increase efficiency, the veneer of legality and the
perversion of medical science.

Nazi crimes were also marked by public indifference, which amounted
to tacit support. Here and now, only 25 percent of Americans told the
latest Pew Research poll that they believe torture is always wrong.

"The CIA's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules,
and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking,
eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy," observed The New
York Times. We have much in common with the Germans.

"In July 2002," the declassified report reveals, a CIA officer
"reportedly used a 'pressure point' technique: with both of his hands
on the detainee's neck, [he] manipulated his fingers to restrict the
detainee's carotid artery." Another agent "watched his eyes to the
point that the detainee would nod and start to pass out; then ... shook
the detainee to wake him. This process was repeated for a total of
three applications on the detainee."

The CIA's rinse-lather-repeat approach to torture is reminiscent of
Dr. Sigmund Rascher's experiments at Dachau and a parallel project
conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army's infamous Unit 731 in occupied
Manchuria in 1942-43. Rascher, who was tried for war crimes after World
War II, froze or lashed detainees nearly to death, then revived them
over and over. German and Japanese doctors developed detailed protocols
governing the severity of exposure to which inmates could be
subjected--protocols seized by U.S. occupation forces and turned over
to the OSS, predecessor of the CIA.

So it was in the CIA's prisons at Guantanamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia,
Eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere.

(Or, to be more accurate, so it is. George W. Bush publicly banned
torture in 2006, but we know it was still going on as of 2007.
President Barack Obama supposedly banned it again earlier this year,
but then his CIA director Leon Panetta told Congress the agency
reserves the right to keep doing it. Until the entire secret prison
network is dismantled and every single prisoner released, it would be
absurd to assume that torture is not continuing.)

Among the verbal treasures in the CIA papers is the "Water Dousing"
section of the "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to
Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," which "allow for
water to be applied using either a hose connected to tap water, or a
bottle or similar container as the water source." Ah, the glorious war
on terror. Detainees may be soaked in water as cold as 41 degrees
Fahrenheit for as long as 20 minutes­--no longer, no colder.

For the record, the CIA's medical expertise is about as reliable as
its legal and moral sense. Forty-one degrees is bracingly cold; 41 was
the temperature of the Hudson River when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed
into it earlier this year. (Remember the ice floes?) "Generally, a
person can survive in 41-degree water for 10, 15 or 20 minutes," Dr.
Christopher McStay, an emergency room physician at New York City's
Bellevue Hospital told Scientific American magazine.

Like its Gestapo and SS antecedents, the CIA is highly bureaucratic.
CIA employees were informed that "advance headquarters approval is
required to use any physical pressures [against prisoners]." And those
permissions came from the very top of the chain of command: the White
House, which ordered the Office of Legal Counsel and other legal
branches of the federal government to draft "CYA" memoranda. The memos,
wrote Joshua L. Dratel in his introduction to "The Torture Papers: The
Road to Abu Ghraib," a compilation of memos authorizing torture of
Muslim detainees, reflect "a wholly result-oriented system in which
policy makers start with an objective and work backward."

Also reminiscent of Nazism is the utter absence of firewalls that
has come to characterize the behavior of top government officials.
Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany corrupt the judiciary by using
the courts to carry out political policy. Beginning under Bush and now
under Obama, judicial independence has been eradicated.

On Aug. 28, The New York Times reported: "In July, Leon E.
Panetta, the CIA director, tried to head off the investigation [of the
CIA's torture program], administration officials said. He sent the
CIA's top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to [the Department of] Justice to
persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. to abandon any
plans for an inquiry." There's a term for this: obstruction of justice.
You're not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an
investigation. It was count six of the impeachment proceedings against
President Richard Nixon.

To Holder's credit, he has appointed a special prosecutor. To his
discredit, the focus of the investigation is narrow: He will only go
after officials who went beyond the Bush administration's over-the-top
torture directives (which allow, as seen above, freezing people to
death). He does not plan to go after the worst criminals, who are the
Bush administration lawyers and officials, including Bush and Dick
Cheney themselves, who ordered the war crimes--much less those like
Obama who are currently covering them up.

He should change his mind. While he's at it, he should throw Leon
Panetta in jail.

Holder's brief currently involves just 20 cases, which include
detainees who were murdered by the CIA. But even those will be tough to
prosecute, reports The New York Times: "Evidence, witnesses and
even the bodies of the victims of alleged abuses have not been found in
all cases."

Because, you see, the bodies were burned and dumped. They--the
CIA--are Nazis for committing the crimes.

And we are Nazis for not giving a damn. Only one-third of Americans
told the April 27 CBS News/New York Times poll that there ought
to be an investigation of Bush-era war crimes--and they don't care
enough to march in the streets, much less break a few windows. So few
of my columns on torture have been reprinted by American newspapers or
Web sites that I seriously contemplated not bothering to write this
one. We have met the Nazis, and they are us.

Ted Rall, president of the Association of American Editorial
Cartoonists, is author of the books To Afghanistan and Back
and Silk Road to Ruin.